leave the dust behind
by lenina20
Summary: Post 4x14. Much to nobody's surprise, Elijah reappears to extend out an offer: Katherine's life in exchange for the cure. And just like that, Klaus and Caroline decide to go on a road trip. Two-shot
1. Chapter 1

**Hello everyone!**

**Here is a two-shot I'm writing to try and deal with the latest episode, because writing fic is how I deal with disappointment. I feel like I must warn you: this is the first time I write Klaus's pov. It was like pulling teeth and I am not really happy with the results, but I at least at to try. Next part we'll be back to my usual Caroline's pov.**

**Still - I hope you'll find something in here that you will like. :)**

* * *

He has never particularly enjoyed driving, but it's enough of a mindless task that he can tolerate it. Could have rushed through the woods across this godforsaken country instead, he knows. It'd have been faster, after all. Would have blown off some steam—run and hunted and fed.

But not _with her_.

He doesn't understand why she's accepted his offer to accompany him—

(He doesn't understand one single thing about her, not even the parts that he sees more clearly—)

—but he's glad, in spite of himself.

(There'll be time to figure it all out.)

_Now_—

His heightened reflexes would allow him to drive three thousand miles straight without sparing one glance at the road—his attention solely focused on her, as ever she grants him with her agonizing company. Her scent flaring his nostrils; the sunrays caught in her blond hair burning a hole through his chest. There's hand around his heart, squeezing so hard sometimes he thinks this too is a ploy—somewhere the witch may be chanting to get him cold and frozen as a rock.

What he couldn't give sometimes, around Caroline—so his heart would stop beating, and so she couldn't hear, the tell-tale bugger.

(Her hands are fidgeting on her lap, knuckles white and reddened tips.)

He can see her, desperately wish for the numbness that will not come. Eyes vacant but twirling with nerves, when his stare bumps into hers, and she sighs. Squirming and breathing fast and distracting him from the thought of how much he wants—

Mistrust doesn't surprise him, when it hits; suspicious minds and all. So he tilts his head and pretends to have an interest in the road laid down before them, hands tightened at last on the wheel. He asks, "Is that why you came, love? To keep me occupied?"

Perhaps not the witch chanting to get him down. Perhaps just Caroline and her broken heart, stabbing her own entrails because that is love, all the people have always told him. Love is pain and sacrifice—but Klaus is sure, there has to be _more_ to it, hasn't it? Otherwise no one would ever bother with the fall.

Caroline—

She doesn't dignify his accusation with an answer, and he goes and maybe loves her a little harder for it. So what is he to do but keep on pushing? He keeps his eyes far and away as he insists, "You think you can distract me so well, sweetheart, that I will forget my obligations?" He smiles it out and away, the shooting pain coursing through his lungs. "Or worse," his voice bends, almost soft, "do you think you can bewitch me so deeply that one day I will no longer want him dead?"

"That's not—"

But her voice is too raspy with the weight of the tears she has cried for _him_; scratches him like sandpaper—so he cuts her off with a grunt. "You shouldn't sell yourself so cheap, Caroline."

"I don't," she whispers, the words so voiceless that the rasp is gone. "Not anymore."

And just like that—

—he wishes, as every time, that he hadn't said a word.

* * *

When they finally stop for gas, he calls Elijah to check in on him.

"If this is a trick, Niklaus—"

He watches her through the glass windows of the shop, stocking herself up with junk food and multi-coloured candy. She smiles politely to the girl behind the counter, and for a second the midday sun shines brighter. But then she turns around, her eyes catch his as they are bound to (_you creep_)—and the light fades out.

Every time, it seems.

So Klaus insists: "It's not a trick, brother." He wishes Elijah could see him now, that the bitter devious smirk would crawl through the phone line. "You'll be happy to know I am on a path of redemption, and you happen to have caught me in a streak of clemency, with what your perfect timing as always."

This is Klaus Mikaelson, big bad original hybrid—learning to extend his mercy upon those who have affronted him.

It's a tragic tale of woe.

Elijah wouldn't doubt him for a second, if only—

—if only he could see him now.

* * *

Two hundred miles from Philadelphia—

"You're gonna kill her anyway, aren't you?" she asks, breaking the endless silence as her teeth tear the head off a surely uplifting bar of bright pink candy.

It's an endearing sight, and so he can do nothing to help the smile tugging his lips upwards, no matter how hard he tries. It's her words, too, and the honesty beneath his answer, "That's why you're here, love."

Well, besides the obvious reason, too. He enjoys her company. She's the sweetest torture he could have ever imagined, inflicting unusually upon him—and it's the painful bits that feel more righteous underneath his steel-hard skin.

"Then you shouldn't have bothered," she chews, shrugging—so unladylike, "I don't give a damn that you kill Katherine."

"But my brother—"

"I don't particularly care about your brother, either—"

"But the cure—"

She turns to him with a sudden, unexpected smile. Lifting up her feet, she bends her knees into her chest and leans back against the car window, so she's fully facing him now. "Keep going, come on," she presses, waiving the candy bar at him. "The list of things and people I don't give a crap about is growing exponentially these days. All thanks to you."

"_Exponentially_," he grins, extending his hand over the gearbox so she passes on the bag of gummy bears. "Well, at least you are no longer playing dumb."

And so she is not—

—for she does not deny the charges.

* * *

It's the middle of the night, and the roadside diner they stop at is empty except for them.

It's dim and quiet and peaceful, and somehow he doesn't find it all that hard to breathe, at last, twenty miles this side of the border.

(They eat only to take a break from the road.)

There's a cooler filled with blood bags in the trunk—a courtesy he extended for her sake, believing foolishly she would appreciate the nice gesture and take it as a peace offering. In the end it cost him an eye-roll and a half-hearted scoff, but it's keeping them nourished in between the candy bars and greasy burgers she devours like she actually could use the calories, burnt talking to him.

Like she craves the sugar high to lift her up, at least.

It seems to work, for she—

"Were you serious," she asks him, feeling unexpectedly conversational, as grease and sugar the balm that quiets the perennial heartache—, "about Elijah loving Elena?"

The endgame of this journey remains the endgame of all journeys, for these people. Who gets to save the doppelganger first. Too bad, he supposes, that Elena Gilbert no longer wants to be saved at all.

Elijah will have to wait another five hundred years to be redeemed.

Klaus, on the other hand—

—he takes a sip from the black, watered-down coffee like it can do something for his emotional distress, other than turn his stomach upside down with nausea. He fixes his eyes on Caroline's neon-lightened silhouette, as only that keeps his hungry gaze away from their waitress's pulsing jugular. It would be so easy, he can only wish. Charm her into arching her neck just the right way for his fangs to sink into her flesh without an itch of a pain. She'd enjoy it; he can, at least, guarantee thorough satisfaction. He wouldn't dream of killing her. He'd heal her and make her forget—replace the memories of his monster face with enticing dreams that would wake her panting every morning for as long as she lived.

Pity. Each and every little thing he is trying to let go of.

If only Caroline's smile would reach her eyes—

—it might be worth it, one day.

"Klaus?"

He nods in acknowledgement, and concentrates his senses on her—all on her, so he forgets about the waitress. Caroline is, after all, the most beautiful thing he has seen in over a thousand years, isn't she? Which pointedly reminds him—

"I am sure you are no stranger to the mysterious allure of the Petrova doppelganger," he finally replies, coffee spoon twirling mindlessly in his cup. "I personally believe it was the witches' evil trap."

"Lucky you are immune."

He appreciates that it is not a question, despite the sarcasm; sometimes, strangely, her old insecurities come out to hunt him, and it catches him off-guard. Because where was he, that was so important that he hadn't met her yet? It's a troubling thought that sakes him so bad he sees red, but it isn't dripping from his hands, so he doesn't know what to do with it. Now though, it makes him smile, because _who is laughing now, mother?_

Funny how Caroline might have saved him, after all—and not in the way those fools for love will tell you, that love, of all things, will set you free.

He beams at her. "It's a delightfully twisted story, like only witches are capable of," he story-tells, the smile unyielding across his lips despite the bad taste of terrible coffee spreading down his throat. "Before I turned I was smitten with this girl, you might've heard. An exquisite beauty, I thought then, but I hadn't seen anything outside my small hunting village, so what did I know? Perhaps Rebekah's right, after all, and my mother did love me in spite of her shame, but I wouldn't go trusting Rebekah in matters of the heart, take my word on that. She loves everyone and_anyone_, and so she thinks the rest of the world is just like her." He feels the smile faltering, threatening to fall off his mouth and into his coffee cup, so he returns to the right side of the tracks. "Anyway, I say perhaps my mother loved me after all because it seems like she certainly underestimated the hardness of my heart. She apparently believed that I might restrain myself from killing the doppelganger, if she looked anything like the girl I once loved." He shakes his head in disbelief. "That I would spare the familiar face, and choose to live forever cursed instead."

It's a sad story.

Even Caroline looks affected, chewing on her chips like a bored child chews on a pencil topper in the middle of a lesson. Head tilted, she lets the words slip out as her eyes look up to his. "Your brother's heart wasn't so hard, was it?"

So he concedes her point with a brisk nod. "Yes, I suppose you're right, and Rebekah is wrong, after all." It was never him who should have opposed the sacrifice of the doppelganger out of foolish, foolish love. For the longest time, that would have been the greatest laugh. Klaus didn't feel, and Klaus didn't care. And so he wouldn't hesitate to break his curse—

—but oh, Elijah had been so foolish. So weak.

(Their mother was so clever.)

Elijah had fallen in love with the girl. All over again.

And so here they are now.

"Personally, I do not understand it," he confesses truthfully, his eyes still on Caroline, riveting; illustrating the certainty behind his convictions. "They are different people who just seem to share a pretty face and a rather unfortunate magnet for all forms of personal tragedy. It _must_ be a curse, I am sure."

But alas—

—Caroline does not agree.

It's clear in the way her back straightens and her whole body clenches, pulled together around her stomach where he imagines it hurts the most. She declares: "It's not a curse," her voice so low and seemingly dead, like she is casting a terrible spell herself. "If it was a curse, you wouldn't be immune. It's just human nature," she shoots, straight to the heart. "We soft-hearted fools have the bad habit of refusing to let go of the people that we love."

With the carefully-aimed bullet, the ghostly hand is back, so tight around his heart. This time it doesn't constrict and freeze; it tugs and tugs and he can feel it, each beat, as the good-for-nothing muscle is slowly ripped out of his ribcage.

He swallows down the already familiar pain, and doesn't say another word.

* * *

It's almost morning when he finally asks her.

There's a fine line of light purple, stretched long and endless right where the mountainous landscape touches the receding night sky. It's beautiful and promising and so he asks, because she's just waking up and he hasn't forgotten for a second—each and every single moment of the night a couple of nights ago, when she slept and he watched her over the deep hollow of her shoulder, nested so tightly into his chest.

"Why didn't you leave with him?"

Arguably, the mercy extended by his almighty hand was highly conditional. He wouldn't have dreamed of letting Tyler Lockwood go, not even for a short while, had he dared take Caroline with him. But still—

He wants to know _her_ reasons.

So he watches her intently, as she yawns loudly and pulls herself together, tucking her legs beneath her as her head comes to rest on the fogged-up window pane. She closes her eyes and whispers, "He never asked me, and I never offered. You would either let him go, or you wouldn't, but he was leaving anyway."

That's hardly a question to any of the many things he wants to know, desperately wishes he could understand about the things that Caroline does, and doesn't do. "You came in to ask me to let him live—"

"As I said, you would either let him go, or you wouldn't. He was leaving no matter what."

It maddens him with frustration, every little thing that she refuses him. So he strikes, the only way he can that will not send her further away. "You should have gone with him," he says, and oh, how much and how hard he means it. If only she had left with Tyler—it would have been so easy, all these pesky decisions he wouldn't be making on an hourly basis, against the instincts screaming from every fibre of his being. "You and Tyler wouldn't be the first, love." On the run. Because of him. "He's the only other hybrid in this world, and you're resourceful. Perhaps you would have made it long enough to get your hands on the leverage, like Katerina—"

She cuts him off with a spit of fire: "I didn't want to go with Tyler—"

—the blow paralyzes him; punches the breath off his lungs—

"—and I don't want to run from you."

And then he notices, dark veins pulled tight around her gorgeous bloodshot eyes. And so he turns his eyes to the windshield, searching for a nearby rest area or a deserted back road. The conversation has made her hungry, it seems; and who is he to ever deny her?

* * *

She's still sipping idly from her blood bag when they cross the sign. Ten miles to go before they reach the hidden-away small town where his brother and the doppelganger should be waiting for them. Elijah, Katerina, and the cure; and with them, Klaus's final and greatest compromise.

But before—

His time alone and confined with Caroline is running out, and he finds himself strangely, and pathetically, at a loss for words. It's a foreign feeling, among many, tht he isn't yet used to; and so it makes him bite his own tongue insistently, drawing blood—perhaps so he does not utter his thoughts like a love-fool slave.

"I thought—"

Her whisper reverberates in the car as low and trembling as the words she spoke on the recent fateful night that he watched her life rot away in her veins, burnt away by the venom that has poisoned his own body for over a thousand years. He almost flinches like a young and feeble _boy_, cowered by the overpowering rage of his father.

"—I thought that maybe it'd be okay, that I didn't want to leave with Tyler, if only I could save him in return. That if you showed mercy, then it'd be okay I just can't let _you_ go."

He doesn't want to hear—

(Because—)

The last time she gasped out a confession just like this, he was henceforth doomed.

She won her life back from him, and with tomorrow, he gave himself away.

So now he refuses to hear, and he refuses to think of what he hadn't known, before the ending of this journey. Focuses instead on the tragic irony of their situation, the words grinding their way out of his clenched teeth. "But you don't believe that I showed mercy."

Her head turns violently to him, her teeth barely letting go of the bag before she blurts, so angry, "Is also a head start, what you've promised to Elijah?"

He sinks his eyes into her, and shakes his head. "My sister has wanted to be human for over nine hundred years, Caroline. It is time I release from the coerced oath I made her swear before my mother's grave."

Caroline dares huff, unmoved. "Which conveniently for _you_ means we'll lose the one and only chance we have to kill you."

"Conveniently," he concedes, knowing for a fact he'll always be better at sophisms just like this. "Which means I will owe my life to Katerina. Quid pro quo, love."

"So no mercy, then," she smiles, looking so sad that he _has_ to look away. "Just like Tyler."

Just like Tyler, he nods. "He, not unlike Katerina before him, took away the one thing I had spent centuries longing for."

"You could force the cure down _her_ throat, couldn't you? You'd be safe, you'd undo her original transgression, and you'd have as many hybrids as you could make."

"And so I would undo, and thus forgive, Tyler's affront?" He turns his eyes back to her, smiling in pride and desire and admiration. How much and how long he'd worship at her altar, were she to ever allow him. "I've thought about it, I won't lie. But family above all, Caroline. I owe it to Rebekah, for the pain that I've selfishly caused her over the centuries, and I'm indebted to Elijah for his loyalty, as he would have handed me over the woman he loved so I could kill her; there is honour in revenge, after all. And yes, I believe that Elijah could easily learn to love a human doppelganger from afar—would hardly be the first time now, would it?—but I'm afraid I would have to drain Katerina dry on the spot or, believe me, she'd find a way to turn herself back in a matter of seconds."

He hasn't seen so many people over the centuries, possessed with the unyielding courage needed to turn oneself. But even among the uniqueness of the doppelgangers—Katerina was always the most special specimen. If only circumstances had been any different, he knows, they might have become such great friends, he and she.

But circumstances are what they are—and his life has played itself out to crown him first and bring him down here, and now—

—with Caroline's baby-blue eyes glistening with furious, unshed tears of want and hatred and impotence as she curses him. "I will never forgive you," she promises, in blood (cross her head and die). "If you kill Tyler, I will never forgive you."

Perhaps—

Perhaps not—

"And yet," he mutters, almost to himself. "Here you are."

(She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not.)

One single tear falls down her cheek. "It's not okay," she whimpers—

—and he cracks open, once again; rocklike melted into quicksand.

* * *

He parks right in front of the little cardboard-like house with the rotting yellow swing, just as Elijah's directions had instructed. Swallowing the habit, he doesn't waste a glance inspecting the property, examining the surrounding area for exists and blind spots. He trusts Elijah's judgement, and that is why he's here; so as he turns the key off the ignition, his hand finds the handle—but Caroline stops him, her small brittle fingers curled around his forearm, and he realizes, painfully—

—this is the first time she has touched him since she woke up in his arms. Alive again against all predictions.

"What happens now?"

He frowns at her, genuinely puzzled because he's certain that he's made the plan clear several times already. "We take the cure from Katerina and we bring it to Rebekah."

She raises an eyebrow, and for a second it seems to him like all is forgiven. How big a fool he is, isn't he? To his credit, she even rolls her eyes at him—"If your brother isn't stupid, he won't trust you."

He smiles, takes her up on her challenge and covers her hand with his. "As I said, that is why you're here, sweetheart. You'll make sure that I don't go back on my word."

It's a part of his design to be reformed. In fact, it is the only part that exists, of any reform plan whatsoever: Caroline holding his hand through every (bad) decision that he makes even though he regrets them beforehand, be that mercy or quid pro quo. Of course, she has a point. Elijah doesn't know, cannot even suspect that Klaus might ever be so foolish so as to care—

—and perhaps that's why, in spite of the unexpectedness, Klaus isn't very surprised when Elijah opens the front door of the foreclosed house with a tight smile, only to reveal inside an entire party of people.

Waiting for them.

"Miss Forbes?"

~  
**tbc.**

* * *

**Thank you so much for reading! Drop me a line if you have comments or suggestions or anything you want to tell me.**

**I'll try to have Part 2 up before Thursday, but I can't make any promises. Regarding the last chapter of WAI, well - Chapter 5 didn't get a great response, so I'm trying to come up with something cool so the ending doesn't bore people to tears. I'll take a bit yet.**

**Thank you again for all your support! I hearts you!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hello guys! Thank you so very much for your kind comments to the first part of this story – also thanks to all of you who favorited and followed! I really hope this second instalment won't be a disappointment – and that it'll make some kind of sense after the latest episode. **

* * *

Nobody asks questions, even though they all look at her like she's the stranger in the room. A couple of raised brows and Stefan's frown, wary but too cautious to say a word, ask her what she's doing travelling with Klaus into freaking Canada. Fine by Caroline, even if Katherine looks cruelly amused, as every time she sees Caroline and remembers, how he murdered her and all—but _quick_, one glare from Klaus and the bitch's shameless deviousness morphs into dread and disgust and so she sits, unusually quiet and immobile by Elijah's side as Caroline takes a seat too, next to Klaus on the empty couch.

She wishes she could sit by Stefan's side, but in spite of her youth and relative naïveté when compared to those who surround her now—Caroline can very clearly distinguish the very tense, very dangerous vibes coming off his side of the room. He's sitting next to Rebekah, just in front of Katherine, and there is no mistaking the evil glares both women are exchanging, or the reason (_Stefan_) behind the evil eyes.

It seems that Klaus was right, after all.

Elijah is a lovesick fool or—perhaps—he's simply too attached to the very bad and very old habit of doing what's right (for a ruthless murderer, like Caroline knows he can be, if must needs).

Whatevs. It's hardly _any_ of Caroline's business, anyway.

Nothing of this whole messy situation is, if she thinks about it. (Nothing except Klaus).

Funny how life works sometimes, isn't it?

She's squirming on her seat, her teeth hard and relentless on her bottom lip like that can repress for long the urge to roll her eyes at them all, and at their crazy emotional entanglements that have been going on and on for centuries now—and it's just her dumb luck, getting herself involved, and having to endure with class the ensuing awkward silence that results of these people's too much drama. She tries to catch Stefan's eyes to gain some reassurance and a tiny comforting smile, but the ugly truth is actually pretty simple: she does not belong here, in a tattered room in a freaky scary abandoned house somewhere in French-speaking Canada, inches from Klaus because it turns out, of all the evil creatures in the world, only the biggest and baddest actually _sees_ her—

—and that is okay, too; because she's sitting in front of the evil woman who held a pillow to her face until she stopped breathing, stopped living, and she doesn't find it her to feel sorry for herself that this is how her life has turned out. She is this close to hearing Klaus's thoughts, and doesn't that tell you something? Caroline can tell that he's tense, all hard-angles and teeth clenched and jaw set; she can even imagine him wondering for her sake, if she feels any shame that, as opposed to her friends, she feels no wish to beg for forgiveness, for the monster she's become.

(She will not be thankful to Katherine Pierce, though.

If only, _well_—for the other many horrible things she might end up forgiving one day.)

As it happens—

—her sin is out in the light for them to see.

No one says a word, at first, and Caroline doesn't even spare a quick glance to the small wooden box cradled in Elijah's lap.

Not until he speaks.

* * *

"How do I know I can trust your word this time, Niklaus?"

The evil grin creeps up Klaus's face in a way that's beginning to become far too familiar for Caroline's liking; it's unsettling, especially as he lifts his hand to point directly at her. "Caroline here will bear witness to my good intentions."

Elijah's eyes are heavy as he takes her in, one breath at a time. "If I give you the cure, Katerina is free," he says, turning his face to Klaus only one beat after he speaks. He tilts his head, "Forever."

Klaus nods, eyes narrowed as he glares at Katherine for a couple of seconds before settling back on the couch, one leg crossed over his knee, the easy smile back on place. "Or I could launch myself at you, break your throat and jump out the window with the cure in my power before any of you had the time to react. But I won't, because, as I said, I'm learning better ways."

Elijah returns the smile, but the gesture looks unnatural, way too stiff on his chiseled composed face. "Good," he says. "Two originals, two centenary vampires who hate you—" The dramatic pause haunts them all for a few seconds, before Elijah's inflexible smile twitches terrifyingly as his unyielding gaze returns to Caroline, "—and this remarkable young girl. Maybe you wouldn't escape so... _unscratched_, brother."

Klaus growls, Elijah's intended meaning clear as rain; he trembles like a beast crouched and ready to attack. "I am here for our sister's sake, Elijah, don't you test my brittle patience unless you want—"

"You're here for _your_ sake, Nik!" Rebekah interrupts him, to nobody's surprise. She's spitting fire through her eyes, and for a second Caroline contemplates the possibility of flinching because, she can sense, hell is coming. "Don't give us that crap about how all of a sudden you want _me_to be happy, after you stuck me in a box for ninety years because I pissed you off—damn _you_, Nik. You're playing the hero now? Who's buying it? And you're letting this psycho-bitch run free after you made _me_ chase her for five hundred years?"

In response, Klaus raises his hands in a mocking gesture of surrender, the smile perpetual and terrible. "So much hostility," he grins, deviously. "Apparently no one in this room believes I'm sincere when I say I'm a changed man, not even my family," he tsks-tsks, his grin bending like clay. "Well, perhaps you may be right. I do have one additional request, in exchange for the life and freedom of one of my brother's true loves. The lady Katerina, in this case."

Stefan rolls his eyes, Rebekah snorts, and both Elijah and Katerina remain unmoved. Like they, in fact, were expecting Klaus's sort-of-evil cockiness, and they still are expecting something else to come. Elijah doesn't sigh, or clench, or even breathe. "What do you want, Klaus?"

Klaus's mischievous grin rings loud, and Caroline's breath catches in her throat. She doesn't know what to expect, but she is terrified that—

"If our dearest Bekah wants the cure, she will take it _now_," he dictates, voice soft and low like there is no veiled threat beneath the unbending command. "I will not allow her to take it back with her."

There's a moment of heavy silence, hanging—

—and then—

—all hell breaks loose.

"You cannot ask her-"

"Are you insane? I cannot just—"

"Well, I can't say I won't be happy to see _you_ die."

"Klaus, come on, don't be a dick. This is your sister we're—"

They all talk at the same time; talk and scream and protest. Caroline hides her face in her hands, and tries to shut down the shouting, swallowing down the bile creeping up her throat.

The fucking _bastard_.

He clearly doesn't want Rebekah to be human; doesn't want her to be happy and free, in the exact same way he will not let Katherine just go, in case his brother might someday find some glimpse of happiness—in the off chance that he manages to tame Katherine, or wait for her to fall out of love with Stefan, or grow a heart and a soul. Forever is a long time, Caroline is beginning to understand; long enough for stranger things to happen. So Klaus isn't going to rush into a decision that will make him look weak, forever; and leave him unhappy and alone. No more clinging emotionally-dependable sister for him to drag around, using and abusing forevermore.

So grants an ultimatum: if she wants it, to be human and live and die—she wants it _now_.

Perhaps he's grown too confident, a thousand years as a king. Perhaps he isn't expecting that his little weak-hearted sister will be so brave. Perhaps he underestimates the pain that he has caused her, in the same way that he dismisses any sort of pain that results from the terrible crimes of his bloodied bloodied hands.

Because—

Caroline can hear the air clotting in his throat when, after much senseless shouting, Rebekah finally stands up.

"Fine," she says, tall and stronger than Caroline has ever seen her as she moves to stand before Elijah, her hand extended, palm wide open and ready—not one single perfectly manicured fingernail trembling.

Not an ounce of fear in her system.

* * *

When she falls to the floor, unconscious, it's Klaus who picks her up in his arms.

Katherine chooses that moment to get out of the front door—the moment when Stefan kneels down beside Rebekah's limb body, swallowing down the knot in his throat while Elijah watches the scene attentively on his feet, his hands hanging limp by his hips, shaking slightly.

Caroline doesn't know what to do, so she doesn't do anything.

She watches.

Notices despite the anguish shining bright in Klaus's eyes that Rebekah's pale skin doesn't turn ashen; her chest heaves beneath the weight of his brother's hand, and her eyelids flutter. Caroline can hear the soft, sluggish rhythm of her heart, still. She is unconscious, but she alive.

Like none of them will ever be.

Stefan combs his hand through her long blond hair, and they all wait for the human girl to wake up.

* * *

She sleeps for four hundred miles straight, curled up in a ball in the backseat with her head resting on Stefan's lap. She barely says two words to them, but when she wakes up, they all can hear the bones in her shoulders cracking; her stomach growling, the little pained moan that escapes her mouth when she stretches her muscles, the little she can in the confined space of Klaus's car.

So ever the concerned gentle brother (_insert snort_), Klaus decides to start making amends, again, by insisting on a motel and an actual bed so Rebekah can get a proper good night's sleep, and a real meal for dinner—none of that junk that Caroline keeps in her purse for emergencies when she really craves some sugar to appease the violent instincts rippling beneath her skin.

Dinner and a proper bed.

They have a newborn human in their care now, so what are they to do but to postpone the rest of their journey back home for a night? They get two rooms in the motel and a table for four at a nearby restaurant. Rebekah eats her face off, a slow smile finally splitting up her face, when she feels the easy satisfaction that comes with quenching basic human needs, Caroline remembers. The three of them, they do their best to smile back at her, but Caroline's easy grin can't reach her eyes—the veins over her cheekbones are pulled too tight, and no Louisiana salad in the world is going to satiate that kind of hunger.

So of course, after dinner: one room is for Stefan, and the other one for Caroline and Rebekah. Klaus will sleep in the woods, he says, if he sees fit.

He's better at thinking ahead.

That's the thing, Caroline realizes with a barely muted whimper—how it always (still) catches her off-guard.

Klaus is so good at being a vampire, the best vampire of them all, that sometimes Caroline surprises herself forgetting—that he is first and always a wolf, and so he needs to run and hunt and prey. Sleep on a bed of grass and twigs with the rest of the beautiful wild creatures that roam the forest at night. He is a wolf that feeds on blood, and so he must leave; must follow the call of the silvery moonlight, steering him away like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Just like—

(She kills the thought with a sharp bite on her tongue, and gets momentarily distracted by the taste of her own blood.)

* * *

(There's a cut-up conversation before the motel.

"Why?" Stefan asks, his hand again buried deep in Rebekah's hair, cupping her nape as his fingers gently draw circles up and down her collarbone.

Klaus barely throws a quick glance at him over the rear mirror. "She would have given it you," he says. If he had allowed Rebekah to hesitate for even a second, her heart would have gotten the better of her, as usual. Or so Klaus believes, the ever-cynical romantic. "She would have risked falling into Mikael's hands in the twenties just to be with you," his voice drops way below the road beneath their wheels, somewhere hellish. "She would have left me. I had to dagger her. I couldn't let her—"

Leave him, Caroline can guess. Sacrifice her eternal beautiful life in the name of true love.

Just like he has let her do just now.

"I wouldn't have taken it," Stefan whispers, her eyes lost in Rebekah like they have never been before. "I would have _never_ taken it from her."

Klaus snorts and, unexpectedly, Caroline finds herself sympathizing with his derision. Of course Stefan would have taken the cure from Rebekah to give it to Elena. And Elena wouldn't have taken it—not now. Not without Jeremy. It would have been only a matter of days before grief turned to anger and sorrow to malice. Only days before cold thoughts seeped into cold hardened hearts. Only days before they all agreed—the greatest good they all good Samaritans could do to this world was to use the cure to slay the dragon.

Kill Klaus.

And what would have Caroline done, then?)

* * *

Caroline hadn't lied when she told Klaus that she hadn't left with Tyler because she didn't want to run from him. She cannot imagine—

—that is the exact opposite of what she had pictured eternity to be like, guided by his treacherous venomous words.

If she entertained the thought for just a minute, that living forever would mean running forever—becoming in the long run (if she ever made as far as a _long_ run) the monster that Katherine Pierce has become over the centuries; then—

—she'd provoke him into biting her again, and she would run as fast as she could, hide as deep as she could, so he wouldn't be able to find her before the poison took over and killed her.

Why prolong the inevitable?

She cannot ever imagine a more terrible calamity that spending as long as she has left, awaiting her death by Klaus's hands. She cannot ever imagine—

—being _ever_ afraid of him.

And so she hadn't entertained the thought, had been glad Tyler was wise enough to understand neither of them was ready or willing to have _that_conversation be their last one. Denial may keep her sane for a few days more, and so she also refuses to get furious at Rebekah's wild assumptions, now, when she says, among tears because that is how fast a human smile can shatter—

"If you are going to take my place by his side, Caroline, then you must know that it's forever," Rebekah warns her, crying into her pillow. "You'll love him just as hard as you hate him now, perhaps even harder."

Caroline shakes her head.

Caroline stands up from Rebekah's bed and goes to try and chase down sleep in her own, and doesn't even look back at her roommate for the night. She had comforted Rebekah's guilt when she sobbed, "I took an oath, Caroline. Always and forever. I have deserted them now. I have left them. I have betrayed them."

No, you haven't.

Caroline wishes she could have said, _you have saved them_, with the steady voice and confident smile of the head cheerleader she used to be. But she cannot be sure, these days; and she will not make promises that she may not be able to keep. So she doesn't say a thing, and roams the paralyzing thought—

—_you must know that it's forever._

* * *

She's outside by sunrise, waiting for him.

He strolls down the motel parking lot, slick blond curls sticking to his neck, clothes slightly disheveled. Looking good enough to eat. A slow lazy smile tugs his lips upward when he notices her, and she finds herself tilting her weight from one foot to the other, her hands fidgeting before she realizes what she's doing, and stops it immediately. Instead she takes a deep breath, because there is no reason to be nervous or act a fool, and schools her face into a facade of indifference so he doesn't see it in her eyes, how hungry the smell of him makes her sometimes.

"Never took you for a fan of the bunny diet," she greets him, leaning back against the hood of his car when he comes to stand by her side.

"I found no people in the woods," he explains, nonchalant. "I considered a quick excursion into town, but I know when and how to keep a low profile, love."

She nods, like she understands. She doesn't, but he reeks of deer and, even though there's no trace of blood in his skin, she knows he was all claws and jaws last night. He's deadlier as a vampire, she has no doubt; but the wolf in him is wilder, angrier, more savage—

—and he just lost his sister. The one person that stood by him, perhaps sometimes against her will, for over a thousand years.

She wants to tell him, _Yesterday you saved you sister_; but it sounds corny and rehearsed inside her head, so instead she says something else, "You didn't dagger Rebekah to protect her,"—because the pull of Rebekah's human blood has kept Caroline awake all night. Not with hunger, she's a well damned better vampire than that; but with the guilty shame of the newborn shameless.

Klaus—as usual—doesn't bother with a lie when directly confronted. He turns his face to hers, and only when he does Caroline notices how close to one another they're standing, in the dim grey light of the new day. "I hadn't broken the curse, yet. Mikael was on my feet." His voice lowers, and his breath tickles the tip of her nose. "I was vulnerable and I was on the run. I wouldn't have made it without Rebekah."

Should Caroline be grateful that Tyler didn't put her in a box and steal her away?

"You were right," she whispers, turning her face away so her mouth isn't inches away from kissing him. He might have only granted Rebekah with her well-deserved freedom to protect his own life, to be rid of the cure, but no one could fault his reasoning. "Stefan would have given the cure to Elena."

Initially, so intended Elijah. Until he heard about Rebekah. He had sacrificed the chance to save both doppelgangers for the sake of his sister, but Stefan—

Klaus shrugs and his shoulder bumps into hers, Caroline wants to believe accidentally. But then he speaks—

"Love is conditional, Caroline. It is the most selfish thing there is."

She wants to snort, because, _what does he know about love?_; but for some unknowable reason her eyes fill up with tears, shockingly, and her throat clenches around a painful puff of air that catches somewhere right outside her lungs. She fights to spit out the words, "Stefan loves Elena—"

But Klaus cuts her off with a dry chuckle. "And Rebekah loves Stefan, I'd say for a reason not completely different from why Katerina loves him too," he says. "Stefan's pain and guilt somehow eases their own, I suppose. Misery loves company, they say."

"That's not conditional—"

But he isn't done. "Stefan and my brother love the doppelgangers because if only they could save them, those terrible damned damsels in constant need to be rescued... Well, imagine that, Caroline" his voice smiles, so painful right next to her cheek. "That would cancel out their suffering."

She feels one tear fall. It's not the things that he is saying; the terrible cynicism of a thousand-year-old monster. It's what's coming next, when the pain in her chest breaks out in a sudden tearful laugh, and she blurts, "You have it all figured out, don't you?"

His hand moves to cup her face, turning her neck and massaging the tender skin behind her ear as he pulls her closer. His eyes find hers, and when they do, the tears fall in mass. He picks them all up, wipes them away with his long calloused fingers as he whispers, "I spent a thousand years in the dark, Caroline, and it came the time when I thought that I wouldn't make it through another day, love." He leans closer and softly kisses her forehead before moving away almost imperceptibly, only enough to lock her eyes on his before the final blow. His thumbs run up her cheeks and she closes her eyes so he can dry off her wet eyelashes; then she sighs, and opens her eyes to his, ready.

"It's not dark anymore, Caroline," he murmurs. "There is light now."

Against his hand, inches from his face—she's breathing a little faster, quick shallow exhalations threatening to turn into heavy pants of guilt and sorrow and longing. The sob sprouts out of her mouth uninvited, and she whimpers: "I'm afraid."

He nods, his forehead coming to rest against hers. "I know."

"No, you don't," she shakes her head, each word a shooting pain up her sore throat, drying up her voice. "I'm not scared of you. I'm not—I'm not afraid that one day I'll just forget the horrible things you've done—"

She doesn't want to run from Klaus because she knows, the way no eighteen-year-old should be allowed to know—

—she'd only be running from herself. And how long can you do that before you disintegrate and disappear?

Caroline doesn't want to disappear.

So she keeps on talking, even if it hurts her like hell. "I'm afraid that I will remember," she whispers, so low, that maybe not even he can hear her; maybe he just feels the words forming against his lips, "—and one day—one day I just won't care."

She'll lose herself and he—

—he grins, and she feels the smile forming against her mouth, and hears it with the sound of a deep breath rippling through her chest. "I can promise you, Caroline," he tells her, as his hands sink into her hair and he holds her head up so she doesn't look away, and can see the honesty shining moist in his dark blue eyes, "you will not forget, and you will _always_ care."

He's been on this world for over a thousand years, and that has to count for something, Caroline figures. He's never forgotten, everything he wishes he could forget. And he's never stop caring, about everything and everyone he wishes meant nothing to him.

So she trusts him on this, and so she breaks inside his arms. "Then how can I ever love you?"

He holds her, hides her face in the crook of his neck, and molds the deepness of his voice so it comes out almost light and playful and arrogant like he likes to be on a good day. "Don't worry, love," he assures her. "I'm confident I will find a way."

~  
.end

* * *

**Thank you guys so much for reading!**

**Let me know what you think (sorry if it was too weird) and yep - unless tomorrow's ep really shakes me, I'm already on the last chapter of WAI, I promise!**


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